Anne Wojcicki, the former CEO of 23andMe, is making headlines this week with a bold $305 million bid to reclaim control of the DNA-testing company she co-founded. In Silicon Valley, Anne is known not only as an accomplished entrepreneur, but also the youngest of the legendary three Wojcicki sisters.
Anne, 51, and her elder sisters, Janet and Susan, are all celebrated high achievers. Janet is a professor of pediatrics and epidemiology at the University of California, San Francisco. Susan was the CEO of YouTube from 2014 to 2023. (She passed away on Aug 9, 2024 at age 56 following a two-year battle with non–small-cell lung cancer.)
The Wojcicki sisters were raised in a quiet Silicon Valley suburb by their mother, Esther Wojcicki, a renowned educator and parenting expert, and their father, Stanley Wojcicki, a respected physics professor at Stanford. In 2023, Mattel honored them with a line of Barbie dolls designed to inspire young girls to pursue careers in STEM fields.
Here’s a look at the lives of the three sisters.
Anne Wojcicki
Anne Wojcicki earned a B.S. in biology from Yale University in 1996 and co-founded 23andMe a decade later with fellow biologist, Linda Avey. By 2008, the company’s retail saliva-based genetic test was named TIME magazine’s Invention of the Year. That same period marked major changes in her personal life as well: she married Google co-founder Sergey Brin in 2007, and the couple had two children before divorcing in 2015, following reports of Brin’s affair with a Google employee.
23andMe became the first company to receive FDA approval to deliver genetic variant information directly to consumers. At its peak, it reached a market capitalization of $6 billion.
But following its buzzy Nasdaq debut, the company struggled. Rising interest rates weighed on consumer demand, while growing privacy concerns about its genetic database drew scrutiny. A major blow came in 2023, when hackers breached the system and exposed the personal data of millions of customers over a five-month span. By fall 2024, 23andMe had lost 98 percent of its value, its independent board members had all stepped down. In March 2025, the company filed for bankruptcy. Shares plunged 50 percent to $0.88, and Anne resigned as CEO.
Now, just months later, she’s returned in a bold effort to win back control of the company she built.
Janet Wojcicki
Janet Wojcicki is an anthropologist and epidemiologist who serves as a professor at the University of San Francisco. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research centers on early life risk factors for obesity, particularly within high-risk populations.
Beyond her academic work, Janet has developed longitudinal birth cohorts of pregnant women to study how nutrition influences neonatal outcomes. She also serves on the board of directors for the San Francisco General Hospital Foundation.
Susan Wojcicki
Susan Wojcicki, the eldest of the three sisters, was the 16th employee at Google. She studied history and literature at Harvard, later earning degrees in economics from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and an MBA from UCLA. In 1998, after returning to her hometown of Menlo Park, she rented out the garage of her home to Google Inc., which used it as its first headquarters. A year later, she officially joined the company.
Over her 20-year career at Google, Susan helped launch several key products, including Google Images, Google Books and AdSense. She also played a central role in Google’s 2006 acquisition of YouTube and later served as YouTube’s CEO for nine years. In 2023, she stepped down to focus on “family, health and personal projects.” She passed away the following year from lung cancer.
Susan married Dennis Troper, a Google executive, in 1998, and the couple had five children. Their son, Marco, tragically died at age 19 from an accidental overdose during his freshman year at UC Berkeley.